


There’s No Home For You Here, Girl

by mysterycultist



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Abandonment, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Order 66, it's like a poem it rhymes, mean Old Man Kenobi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:01:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22287556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysterycultist/pseuds/mysterycultist
Summary: Not long after the Jedi Purge, Ahsoka tracks down Obi-Wan. She’s angry, she has questions, and he wants her to leave.She brings up a lot of thoughts and feelings he’d rather repress. It seems that both of them have strayed closer to the dark side than they’d like to admit.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Ahsoka Tano
Comments: 5
Kudos: 66
Collections: Kudos





	There’s No Home For You Here, Girl

Obi-Wan senses the disturbance before he hears it in the rocks. For half a heartbeat he thinks it’s the Lars’s, coming to return the baby. 

That foolish panic is set aside quickly. However much he’s cut himself off from the Force, he feels this, and what he feels is much stronger than any trace connection one might sense from an infant. Even a very gifted infant. 

He stands with his hand against the wall by his front door while the rumble in the canyon grows violent, and that echo in the Force picks up volume and pitch until it’s like a blinding scream. 

He knows that feeling. 

He finds that he isn’t breathing—when he gasps for air—At some point, he pressed his back up to the wall and took hold of his lightsaber. 

Enough of that, he thinks, and just as the rumble hits its peak, the canyon goes quiet. 

He takes a breath. He’s prepared for this. He fears nothing this world could throw at him. 

In one push, he turns and steps forward and crouches out the doorway. He stands for a minute squinting before he throws his hood back. 

“What are _you_ doing here?” 

Ahsoka Tano leaps off the sad old speeder she must have rented at Mos Esley. Boots stamp into sand and raise a dark cloud, and she shouts, “Master!” 

“I’m not your master. Now leave! Go!” 

She spits on the ground. Unfortunately, Obi-Wan’s first thought is, _What a waste of moisture._

“You knew I was alive,” she accuses. Her voice rings over the rock and he thinks, if he hadn’t earned such a reputation here no doubt there’d be desert dwellers all over them now. Anakin truly taught his padawan nothing about his homeworld. Ahsoka levels her finger at him. “You hid from me!” 

Obi-Wan says, “Yes.” 

Ahsoka begins to storm toward him—one step after the other, turning the sand, fists clenched—and beneath his robe, Obi-Wan readies his hand at his saber. 

He’s ready for this. 

But, just as abruptly—Only half the distance cleared between them—her legs seem to almost buckle beneath her. She stops. With so, so much pain, Ahsoka asks—“ _Why?_ ” 

_Oh_ , Obi-Wan thinks. He knows he’s grimacing. 

Ahsoka has grown, as children do, since he last saw her. She’s taller, and her lekku are a more imposing frame around her face. But other things age her more—a leanness, a thinness around the bones. Shadows under the eyes. 

In the ever-present whirl of his thoughts, Obi-Wan chastises himself: _You always left her by the wayside, from the very beginning._

“I didn’t want to be found. By anyone,” he tells her. Truthfully. 

Ahsoka stares at him for a beat. He stares back. Then, suddenly, she crouches down and fishes in the sand and leaps back up and— 

Obi-Wan crouches as the rock flies into his home, loudly knocking something over. 

“Screw you!” she shouts. 

“Go away!” Obi-Wan shouts back, just as loud, and whirls around back inside. 

Oh, she broke the caf boiler. 

Of course she follows him in. 

Obi-Wan is on his knees gathering pieces of glass into his hand. He’d had half a pot saved for later, which has splashed onto the wall, down the convector cooker, on the floor and surely everywhere else as well. The coffee color pools under the shards of glass in his palm, stains the edges of his robe. Ahsoka sighs heavily behind him. 

“Do you want help?” 

He turns his face just enough to glimpse her. “Obviously not.” 

“Fine,” she says. 

He does not take the bait when she begins scuffing her boots around his house, picking things up and dropping them. He takes the dishtowel hanging off the cooker and mops. 

“Nice radio,” she says from the other room. 

It is _not_ a nice radio. He assembled it clumsily himself from parts he’d bought with the loth-cat’s share of what he got for his ship, and it took him months of tear-wrenching trial and error to get it working as well as he needed it to. He needed access to broadcasts from here to the other edge of the galaxy, and he didn’t have a master engineer at his beck and call anymore to just make it so. 

She knows that, because she was apprentice to a master engineer. She’s wiser there than he. He’s sure she’s envisioning all the ways she could improve on his work, right now. 

“Turn it on,” he says. “Have a ball, if you’re determined to be an intruder.” 

She turns it on. It’s set to the local smooth jizz station. 

That’s just because it’s early. He turns that on to sleep. He still has to sleep, after all. 

The rough fabric of his robe scrapes the adobe floor as he pivots on his knee, toward the narrow doorway that Ahsoka peeks through. There’s a faint light in her eyes. “At least you still have your vices, Obi-Wan.” 

He finds that although he told her not to call him Master, he dislikes Ahsoka addressing him by his name. He also finds it strange that in the last two years she has changed so much from a child to an adult. She looks at him now, from one eye, with all the baby fat gone from her cheeks and so much taller, her lekku grown just enough that anyone would register her a woman, not a little girl. Which is still, regardless, how he sees her. Fairly regularly, but right now in particular, he remembers the moment she stepped out of that transport on Christophsis. Obi-Wan was only pretending to imagine that she was meant for him, because _he’d_ made the decision to give her to Anakin, but even so he imagined then that she was the girl he’d teach everything he knew. To fool Anakin, which was always a full-body and mind effort. And in a way, Obi-Wan did. Although she was, is, and always will be all Anakin’s, Obi-Wan did teach Ahsoka everything he could. It wasn’t fair of him. He never trusted Anakin enough. 

Maybe rightly so. Maybe rightly so. 

He thinks Anakin always believed that Obi-Wan had wanted his padawan for himself, actually. Maybe in some ways he was jealous of her. 

Ahsoka’s lip quirks. She tilts her head, leans on her hip. “I know what you’re doing. You’re pretending that you’re Master Yoda, because you think that’ll make you immune to everything. You aren’t Master Yoda, Obi-Wan. You’re just as much a piece on the board as I am. Like Qui-Gon said, right?” 

“What do you mean?” 

“We’re chess pieces to the living Force,” she says. “We know it’s alive because it’s a player. Light against dark.” 

That’s a parrot from her master, but Obi-Wan never taught him that. 

He turns back to his floor and his glass. 

“That’s not the way of the Force. Life is not a game. It’s like a poem.” 

“How so?” she asks. 

“There must be harmony in the syllables.” 

He feels her not speaking as he picks up glass specks on the pad of his finger. 

“That means one voice, no competition. A competition would mean shouting. That just isn’t sustainable.” 

He’s stood up now. He's brushing his hands and the cup he's made of his robe free of glass, into the bin, and snapping around to pick up the metal pieces and toss them as well. That will be five or six fewer meals, which is maybe a week less of life he’ll have if he reaches the age of infirmity: no great loss, as the boy will have reached maturity long before then. And he does not think he’ll get that far without caf. 

Behind him, Ahsoka snorts. That is, he notes, a delayed reaction. “The Force really is all semantics to you,” she says. 

“Understanding,” he corrects. 

“Mm-hmm,” she says, just like her master. 

“Go away,” he says, suddenly exhausted. 

A new vigor seems to possess her. Ahsoka, all orange and blue and brightness, storms out of his sitting room and toward him, and she says, “You’re a coward. You couldn’t face me because you couldn’t admit that you couldn’t prevent the slaughter, because you’re prideful. You made me think I was alone in the galaxy because you’d rather shroud yourself in pride, you _coward._ You disgust me, Master.” 

“Careful,” he says. He tries to ease the tightness in his voice. “You’re among the last of the Jedi. Don’t lose yourself in rage.” 

“I won’t lose myself,” Ahsoka spits. “And you know better than anyone that I’m no Jedi.” 

Obi-Wan has an armchair to the right of his door, against the wall. He's draped it with a machine-woven sheet, just sack pillows and a welded frame. This is the way of people on Tatooine, taking things more poorly made than what he had on Coruscant and adding small rough comforts that makes it more luxury than anything he had in the Temple. To sit there feels like a sin, not because of the comfort, but because it’s his to grant or deny, keep or give away. 

He sits. “Did you come to seek knowledge, Ahsoka? Did you come to learn from me?” 

“I came to seek reality,” she says. 

“The only reality you’ve known. Was life in exile so terrible?” 

“No,” she says. “It just wasn’t home.” 

“So the Temple was your home? You know it wasn’t. It belonged to none of us. Do you know that?” 

“You’re lying,” Ahsoka says. 

“No,” he says. “It’s just easier to tell yourself that I am.” 

“It’s easier for you to say that,” she says. “You sound so wise. But you’re a man, you’re a person. You know it was home. You grew up there just like I did, didn’t you? You lived in the same rooms. I know you loved it just the same.” 

Obi-Wan lived in different rooms than she did: the youngling wings were converted, in the intervening generation, to geriatric wards, and the former visitors’ wing was renovated for the younglings because the building materials there were less harmful to developing bodies. The rooms Obi-Wan grew up in had brighter light and a more cramped layout, a labyrinth of little rooms and corridors that children would chase one another through when the masters weren’t around, as dust whirled up from their feet scraping the corners, into the sun. When the masters returned they would still, sit in rows beside each other—in just the way they would go to sleep at night. It changed while Anakin was coming up. Obi-Wan remembers the night terrors he had in his new bed. 

“How do you know what _home_ is?” he says, sharply, from his armchair. Hands perched on edge, legs crossed. “Home is a possession the Jedi forsook. Did your master teach you to imagine it?” 

Ahsoka draws her chin down. Her look is severe. “My master told me next to nothing about his life. I know what I’m talking about when I say the Temple was my home because I’m alive and I don’t deny it. Mice have homes, I had a home. You had a home, and it’s gone now, and Master—why did you forsake me? What did I do to make you deny me even now, Master, even now that we have _nothing?_ ” 

_Nothing?_

She steps toward him, kneels down on one knee—just enough that she _could_ stand. “ _Nothing,_ Master.” 

“Don’t call me Master,” he says. 

Her eyes cry out. Her arm rests on her knee, hand limp. She shakes her head. “There really aren’t any more of us left, are there? You wouldn’t speak to me if there were. There’s no one.” 

It’s strange. He knows his heart is beating, but he feels everything in his chest still. “There’s no more left,” he says. 

There’s a light that goes out in her eyes. He sees her sinking, little by little, into his floor, on her knees. 

He waits that length of time. 

“Anakin’s dead,” she says. 

“He’s dead.” 

She shakes her head. Then she shakes her head again, roughly. “I didn’t feel him anymore,” she says. “But I thought I’d _know._ Did you know? _”_ she asks. 

“I was there,” he says, and he witnesses the birth of a hunger in her eyes. Distract her—distract her now. “When my master...” 

“When Master Qui-Gon died?” 

“Yes,” he says. “I was with him. That’s why I trained your master. It was his dying wish.” 

“What about Anakin? Did you sense it? Were you there?” 

He shakes his head. He looks above, his eye drifts from spot to spot on the ceiling, down the corner of the wall... In his peripheral vision, he sees her eyes following his like a loth-cat follows a beam of light. He says, “I was not there when he died, but I saw his body. He was cut down and he fell into a fiery pit. The flames consumed him. There was not much left.” 

"How did you know it was him?"

Obi-Wan reaches under his chair. He lifts up Anakin's lightsaber.

Her eyes are locked there.

After a long moment, Ahsoka’s head falls. “I’ve been telling myself he’s dead,” she says. She stops to take a steadying breath. She will not cry, he's startled to realize. Anakin was always free with his tears, but Ahsoka will contain hers. “But,” she continues. “I said you were dead, too.” 

“Trust your instincts,” he says, hollow. 

“How could he die?” 

“He was human.” 

“You’re lying,” she says, hard. 

“Search your heart,” he says, with as much heart as he can muster. “Could I lie? Could _I_ lie?” 

Obi-Wan watches a water droplet fall to the dry clay of his floor. She draws in a sharp breath, a wet sniff. Then, Ahsoka sobs. 

So, he was wrong. 

She’s just breaking, breaking. Obi-Wan takes it in from his chair. Her very faith is shattering but he, he has the benefit of long-term numbness. He replaces the lightsaber beneath his seat.

“Why wasn’t I there?” she asks, insensibly. Because you were spared, he thinks. “Why didn’t he wait for me?” 

That, Obi-Wan can’t answer. 

She falls onto her other knee, brings her forehead to the ground, and clenches her fists white on the floor. He is prepared to wait until she is all dried out of grieving, but with a bang of her fist she catches her breath up, goes still, and as he watches her rate of inhale-exhale becomes regular. She quiets. 

She sits up, wipes her wrist over her eyes and nose. “How did you survive?” 

“I was riding a steed when I was shot down on Utapau. The shot hit it, not me, and I fell into a pool of water. The clones thought me dead, and I stole a ship to escape. I’m sure you heard the message from the Temple?” 

“Yes,” she says. 

“I sent it,” he says. “You’re the first one I’ve met who listened.” 

This is not a lie. 

“Rex is alive,” she offers him—with astounding grace. “He saved my life. He took the chip out—I don’t know where he is now.” 

“I’m glad,” Obi-Wan says, truthfully. “He’s a good man.” 

“Anakin--he was alone?” 

Obi-Wan nods. 

“Was it quick?” 

No. 

“The body was too burned to say. He may have perished before he ever felt the flames.” 

“When did it happen? What time?” 

He shakes his head. She's still feeling for a hole in his story, a way out. There is none. “Not long after it happened to you.” 

She nods. “Okay. Okay. I didn’t feel it.” 

“There was so much to feel, Ahsoka. The Force was ripped apart.” 

She nods slowly, her eyes drift... “Padmé. Did she die after...? Did she know?” 

Obi-Wan shakes his head. 

He doesn’t ask why, for the love of everything, she would ask if Padmé knew. 

He worries at the hem of his sleeve while gnats whirl around the lamp and she gazes off into nothing. Finally she stands up. She brushes the dust from her knees. “You want me to leave.” 

His thumbnail catches on a thread, and Obi-Wan make a show of carefully removing it and threading the fiber into place through a small hole in the fabric, tying the microscopic length of it off. “Stay a while, if you wish,” he says, eventually. 

“Okay,” Ahsoka says. He waves off to the side, where the wire spool he uses for a footstool is tucked into an open cabinet. She takes it out and sits, not near him but not far away. 

“I asked because—About Padmé.” 

He has picked up his darning, for something to do, and he twirls his hand in the air without looking up—Yes, yes. Go on. 

“She was in love with him. She never said so, exactly. I’ve wondered ever since I heard that she died so soon after it happened...” 

She doesn’t ask, so Obi-Wan doesn’t answer her question. She leans into her knees with the light at her back, into a shadow. 

“You live all alone here,” she observes. He nods. “I live alone, too,” Ahsoka says. 

“I hope you aren’t thinking you’ll move in.” 

She snorts. A dark little wash of relief comes over him. 

“Why weren’t you with him?” 

“Despite what you may think, Ahsoka, it was not a law that former masters and padawans always be together. Anakin was becoming much more independent. We worked apart frequently in the months before his death.” 

“It’s just that he never liked working with other Jedi much, and it wasn’t his way to work alone all the time. You were good at it. I... It’s taken me a long time to adapt.” 

Obi-Wan considers telling her how many mornings he saw Anakin with bloodshot eyes, after she left, because he’d been up all night waiting for her to come back. Or call. The first thing Anakin had told him after Ahsoka left was that she meant it and it was for good, but Anakin was not good at letting go of hope. As far as Obi-Wan is aware, he never stopped looking for signs of her: asking around wherever he happened to go, using his connections to Chancellor Palpatine to discover any sign of her on official channels, rentals or passenger lists or what-have-you, sightings on security cameras. For a while, Anakin did something he’d never bothered to do before: consistently ensure that Temple administrators knew where he was going when he left and how to contact him. In case someone was looking, of course. In case someone needed him. 

Obi-Wan thinks that telling her about that would be a cruelty he should not indulge in. 

On the stars, it’s a cruelty that the two of them are still alive. 

“Obi-Wan? Are you alright?” 

He pulls back violently at her hand on his shoulder. 

Ahsoka stands back, and Obi-Wan is an old man cringing in his chair. His yarn is abandoned on his lap, half fallen to the floor. 

She holds her hands up, arms drawn in at her sides. Deliberately, he forces himself into a position of ease. He picks up his yarn. “I am quite alright. I have plenty of time to consider my losses, Ahsoka. I am quite used to it. And I will not remind you that the galaxy’s arms continued to spin when you left, but I will thank you for the service you did on Mandalore. Were it not for that, you would likely have been in no danger that day. For a long time, I was sure you were killed.” 

“Fat good I did anyone,” she says. 

_Hmph_ , he says. 

“I don’t understand why you hate me, though.” 

_“_ I don’t hate you,” he says sharply. “I disapprove of your choices, and if you haven’t noticed, I am no longer a kind man. In fact, I don’t believe that I even disapprove of you anymore, Ahsoka. I’m simply indifferent.” 

“ _Ha!_ ” she says, and she sounds so much like a hollow pot being hit for its last grain of flour that it startles Obi-Wan out of his darkness. 

On a little, thready note of the Force, he feels a memory of Anakin that isn’t his: looking down, from the shadow of his hood, his face unreadable. The faintest shade, like the stain a cup leaves on a table... 

Obi-Wan finds himself grabbing at it, turning it over like a flimsi sheet of intelligence. But it fades. 

He can’t be bereaved. He just sighs. “You were upset that he didn’t leave with you,” he observes. Obi-Wan certainly thought he would. He thought he’d never see Anakin again when he ran after her, and a terrible prideful corner of his heart marked it a victory that he chose to stay with _him_. When Anakin was young, and threatened leaving, Obi-Wan had certainly resolved a dozen times over to follow him out. He had thought then that Anakin couldn't survive without him.

Ahsoka’s face crumples. She grins through her pain while her eyes cry out, presses her fist to her forehead. Were she a droid, he would say she is malfunctioning. “The thing is, I knew he wouldn’t. I knew he would never believe I made the right choice, and I knew he’d never understand how he could train such a failure.” 

“He didn’t think of you as a failure, Ahsoka,” Obi-Wan says carefully. “Just lost.” 

She swings her head back and forth, fist steadfast on her skull. “I wasn’t there.” 

“You would not have been there, Ahsoka,” Obi-Wan says—The brightest bubble of kindness he has felt in years rising up in his chest, somehow. “You are strong, and you follow your own feelings before you let someone lead you blindly down the unrighteous path. You would _never_ have been there. I believe that.” 

She shakes her head, frowning, forehead creasing. Inside, Obi-Wan reigns himself in. 

“It’s not just that,” she says. “Near the end—near the end of my time there, I could feel him pulling away from me. We didn’t talk like we used to, and when I reached out to him, he just... wasn’t there. And I know he was preparing me for my trials, but I _wasn’t ready!_ I wasn’t the Jedi I was supposed to be—there was so much I didn’t know, and I still needed him.” 

“Perhaps he felt he had nothing more to teach you.” 

“Bullshit! He was the Chosen One! He hadn’t begun to teach me! We could’ve spent three more years on aircraft mechanics alone, and he spent more time teaching me that than he ever did how to be a Jedi! I didn’t want to be one, I decided that—But, damnit! He should have given me a fighting chance. And all the time I wanted to ask him, Master, what have I done to displease you? But I was afraid.” 

A chill runs down his mainline. “Afraid of what?” 

“That he would say I hadn’t done anything to displease him. That I was exactly what he expected me to be.” 

Somehow this hits him in the chest. 

Ahsoka, you are not the only one to fall short. 

Collect yourself. He's seeing stars. 

“Ahsoka. What did you want him to teach you?” 

She shakes her head. The base of both wrists are pressed there, willing the thoughts back in, maybe. “And I’d always thought—I know some Jedi don’t stay close to their former Masters, but I never expected...” 

“Did you love him?” 

She looks struck. “He was like my father.” 

Obi-Wan strikes his hand on the sidetable. “And _that_ is the issue! _That_ was Anakin’s fault! Jedi are not _supposed_ to be fathers or brothers or _anything_ more than masters to their padawans. That was always Anakin’s folly, that was the source of his _bitterness_ , he felt scorned by a family he’d imagined in his head! He never understood that we _weren’t_ his family! He shouldn’t have _had one!_ We were _Jedi_ and we vowed to follow the path of no attachment, no personal wealth, no fantasies of individual value or personal salvation. He _never_ learned! He was a _fool_!” 

Slowly, ever slowly, like through molasses his heaving breaths calm in the wake of his voice and Ahsoka blinks each of her eyelids over her wide, child’s eyes. 

“You don’t mean that, Obi-Wan,” she says gently. 

“Of course you don’t understand,” he says, harsh, but no longer shouting. “How could you?” 

Not just that she was his padawan’s padawan, but she was ignorant of everything that had happened to her master. Everything he’d become. As she’ll always be, if Obi-Wan has any say. 

“You loved Anakin,” she says, simply and quietly. Obi-Wan’s breath goes leaden in his chest, he bows his head. Anger gone. Vanished, and all that’s left is all that’s always there. 

“We both did,” she says. Her voice catches, and she takes a moment to collect herself. Overhead, the fan whirs softly in its vent. “And it hurts, but I think I’d be so much more alone now if I didn’t have that. However much I hate him, at least I know he loved me. I know he did. Maybe he’s the only one in the galaxy.” 

Obi-Wan shakes his head. “You were loved, Ahsoka. You brought it out in people, just like him. You’ll be loved again. I know that much.” 

“So will you.” 

She places her hand on his, clenched over the arm of his chair. As kindly as he can, he pulls away. “I want to be alone,” he tells her. “That is what I want.” 

Ahsoka had been crouched beside him. While she confessed, she sunk down, and while he had his outburst she’d leaned in to comfort him. He can’t pretend that she isn’t good at her core. At her core, she’s good. 

She rises up, her face a mask. 

“All right. We will both continue to be alone. I can live with that.” 

He nods. 

Stars, he is weak. Weak, weak, weak. Please go, leave, take your memories. 

“I hope the best for you, Obi-Wan Kenobi. May the Force be with you.” 

In his chair, he watches her disappear out into the sun of the doorway. The curtain falls behind her. He listens to the engine start, until its rumble can no longer be felt in the walls of the canyon. 

**Author's Note:**

> Forgot to shove it into the text, but Bail told her. Like, how long could he hide that from Fulcrum?
> 
> Wrote half of this in second person and had to go back and change it, even though it tears my heart out to use third. Sorry if it's psychotic!
> 
> [ _End of the Line_ ](https://open.spotify.com/track/7v2VkodisYqQhcFiPjVsDw?si=MQFME6l4QNacnTA4eO9bOw)
> 
> [ _Fireproof_ ](https://open.spotify.com/track/64zdnlftDUEpPQbOut0sV2?si=TUXlnW78S1KZvrYbxzYe6g)
> 
> [ _D.O.A._ ](https://open.spotify.com/track/3ZzlUOhIhw54YXvVZaVaVZ?si=J48_OrUpTiyMB8MjyVRNTQ)


End file.
